Children are a major disappointment in most cases, which is why I say that the modern ideology of parenting is baloney. People who don’t have them aren’t missing anything they really need. They’re not helping keep the race in business, no, but they’re not suffering for it either.

I didn’t mind it so much, but I did a lot of it at a distance, the result of a fragged marriage. Still, this seems true:

I used to wonder why my parents, especially my mother, kept bugging me to have children. Now I know. They were getting even.

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Then again, there’s always the saying about “Be nice to your kids; they’ll pick what ‘home’ you wind up in.” And I admit that’s my one big fear about getting old and sick and being unmarried and without offspring: there may be no one near by who gives enough of a crap about me to make sure I don’t die prematurely. (Or worse, wind up in some hell-hole of a “home”)

It doesn’t help that some of my SmugMarried former friends used to point this out to me occasionally.

It would less resemble baloney if it did not involve “parent” as a verb.

My mom and dad raised my brother and me. They did this by letting us be kids — because they were only too happy to be the grown-ups. “Parenting,” it seems to me, barely treats the offspring as human beings, let alone kids. And “parenters” acting like grown-ups? Fuhgeddaboutit!

All the rules in the world are useless if the child refuses to cooperate, as many of them do. Or simply stall and wait you out. Punishing is very tiresome, especially because it involves cooperation as well. Most other forms, particularly the corporal variety, are illegal. He makes a phone call. You go to jail. You find yourself at their mercy quicker than the childless imagine.

A good lawyer could help you plan what will happen to you should you become incapacitated for any reason, including old age.

Spanking is not illegal in Texas so long as it’s open-hand, but once they’re adolescents—the age of maximum uncooperativeness—you can forget it.

For one thing it’s humiliating and they won’t forgive you, ever. For another they’ll fight back. Then you’ll be approaching illegality within seconds, or your own injury if you’re smaller or weaker.

Friend of mine has an unruly daughter. After she’d slammed her bedroom door a few times, he removed the door. She got worse. So they sent her to a military school in New Mexico for thousands of dollars a semester. She fought back passively, by simply refusing to cooperate, and the school finally called and said they should come get her. She’s presently coasting through a public high school, clandestinely dating college boys. The future is murky.

Child-rearing always works best in theory, and in the movies, and other media. In practice you’re on your own, competing with a kid who’s at least as smart as you are and sometimes smarter. And a government bureaucracy that is not on your side.

It is written

"Here's how you could get rich: Start a women's clothing store called 'SIZE 2,' in which all garments, including those that were originally intended to be restaurant awnings, had labels with the words 'SIZE 2.'" — Dave Barry